Many different enterprises run complex networks of servers to implement various automated communication functions to the enterprise. For example, as mobile wireless communications have become increasingly popular, carriers such as Verizon Wireless™ have customer communication systems to provide notifications of account related activities to their customers, for example as SMS messages to account holders' mobile stations, as emails, etc. Because of the large number of customers served by a major carrier, and the level of account activities, the volume of notification message traffic is quite large. To effectively provide such notifications, Verizon Wireless™ implemented its Customer Communication Enterprise Services (CCES) as an enterprise middleware web service.
At a high level, the CCES middleware comprises a web server layer and an application server layer. The architecture allows clients to send a request, for example for a notification, to a web server. The http web server then forwards the client request to one of a number of application servers. Each application server has multiple applications running on it. The application server determines the proper application to process the client request based on the context root of the client request. The application server processes the client request, in the CCES example, by sending one or more request messages to a back end system such as the Vision Billing System, MTAS, the SMS gateway and others, for example, to implement account activity and to initiate subsequent automatic notification thereof to the account holder. Once the application server has processed the request, a reply is then sent back to the web server which will then forward the reply back to the client.
As the number of applications provided to customers and the number of customers increase more application servers are needed to handle the incoming requests. Further, along with creating new application servers, whole groups of application servers may be migrated to another geographically-distant data center based on facility requirements. In order to create a new WebSphere Application Server (WAS), IBM HTTP Server (IHS), or Application Server, an application server administrator currently has to login to the particular server and generate each property manually.
The generation of the server properties is time consuming. Some of the properties include server instances, clusters, datasources, and calls to the web server. Currently, each property must be generated by the server administrator for each application server. This time consuming task for one application server becomes a tedious and difficult task when creating a cluster of servers which need identical settings. The creation of server properties can take 4-5 hours, even using experienced server administrators. Currently, none of the venders who provide application server software have an application for an automated process to create or configure application servers. This application is also not provided by third parties.
One attempt at a solution to the above problem uses one-time scripts. For this solution, a server administrator creates a program to set a server property. These scripts are made-to-order, in that they are written for the particular application server at hand and are not usable for other application servers. In addition, this holds true for scripts to update server properties.
Hence a need exists for in the dynamic creation of application server objects and the ability to copy application server settings onto another application server quickly and efficiently.